Watchwords: Why our music fest is called Osheaga

Fantasia. Just for Laughs. Nuits d’Afrique. Most of Montreal’s summer festivals have names that convey an immediate meaning. But what of Osheaga? The annual music festival is taking place this weekend in Parc Jean-Drapeau, and I suspect that among the tens of thousands of people now revelling in the strains of Nick Cave, Lorde, the Arctic Monkeys and many other bands, only a handful will have any idea why the festival has such a name. Osheaga is, beyond question, a term with aboriginal roots. The exact nature of those roots, however, is difficult to specify.

The official story, given on both the festival’s website and Wikipedia, is that Osheaga referred to the area now called Montreal, and that it was a name heard by the French explorer Jacques Cartier. As they headed downriver toward the Lachine Rapids in the fall of 1535, Cartier and his men are said to have begun waving their arms, and the surprised Mohawks reacted by calling the French “O she ha ga,” or “people of the shaking hands.” Cartier didn’t realize the Mohawks were talking about him; he thought they were saying “large rapids.” It’s a nice story, one that highlights cultural misunderstanding.

Some people in the Mohawk community of Kahnawake, I’m told, adhere to a version that’s close to the Wikipedia story. In this telling, the word in question was “Oshahaka,” or people of the hand. The aboriginal people on the riverbank referred to the Frenchmen as Oshahaka not because of their frantic waving but because of their odd desire to shake hands. Yet the sound of both Osheaga and Oshahaka is pretty close to that of Hochelaga — the name, in Cartier’s published account of his travels, of the fortified town on the mountain where dozens of longhouses housed a substantial population. Hochelaga is widely thought to mean “beaver dam” or “beaver lake.”

The problem is that the language spoken by the farming people who welcomed Cartier was almost certainly not Mohawk — although eventually some of those people, or their descendants, may well have joined the Mohawks in what’s now the state of New York. Historians now prefer the phrase “St. Lawrence Iroquoians.” In the decades after Cartier sailed back home, the people who had fed and welcomed him disappeared as a society, with European diseases playing a major role. Their language died, too. The Mohawk name for Montreal is Tiohtia:ke (pronounced something like Jo-jah-geh), signifying “place where the group of people split up.” It’s also, of course, a place where rivers divide and reunite.

It was, as far as I can tell, a local lawyer and author named W.D. Lighthall who first came up with the idea that in Jacques Cartier’s mind, the Lachine Rapids went by the name Osheaga. Lighthall cut a prominent figure in English-speaking Montreal a century ago — he even spent a few years as mayor of Westmount — though he’s largely forgotten today. I’m not sure if he realized that in the Mohawk language, Kahnawake means “place of the rapids.”

We may never have a definitive answer, and perhaps we shouldn’t want one. Whatever Osheaga, or a name like it, meant half a millennium ago, the survival of the word today acts as a kind of homage to the indigenous people who flourished in this region long before the French arrived. The island of Montreal was well-known to both Iroquoian and Algonkian peoples; it was a meeting point of nations and languages long before the French showed up. Some of the city’s most familiar streets (Côte-des-Neiges, for instance) began life as aboriginal paths.

The name “Canada” also goes back to the St. Lawrence Iroquoians. Various translations of it exist: settlement, village, cluster of dwellings. “Quebec,” too, has a clear origin: it’s an Algonkian word meaning “place where the river narrows.” The origin of “Toronto,” by contrast, is fraught with doubt. It also comes from an aboriginal source and is often said to mean “meeting place,” a convenient notion for the city’s self-image. But some experts now believe the name is much more likely to originate from a Huron word that meant “where there are trees in water” and that initially referred to Lake Simcoe, a short drive north of the present-day metropolis. Toronto, like Osheaga, may derive from a cultural misunderstanding.

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